Fashion
Why Does My Teenager Insist on Wearing Used Clothes?
Our fashion critic offers guidance to a reader seeking to refine their daughter’s thrifty wardrobe while respecting her fashion choices.
I have a wonderful teenage daughter who insists on wearing clothes from thrift stores, and she wears mostly T-shirts and shorts or sweat/lounge pants. But she is on the verge of adulthood, and sometimes, like special occasions, thrift won’t cut it. How can I help move the needle in her wardrobe? — Queenie, Old Saybrook, Conn.
The first thing you have to ask yourself when it comes to what could be called the “fashion gap” (like generation gap, but make it about the wardrobe) is whether your discomfort is really about your child making inappropriate clothing choices, or about your own prejudices and preconceptions.
We all bring our own sense of “appropriate” to our judgments about dress, and those senses are formed by the social and cultural stereotypes in which we came of age. Your reality is not necessarily your child’s reality, and understanding that is crucial to understanding how she is dressing. In fact, in a post-pandemic world where working from home and casual everyday clothing are the norm, a more relaxed kind of dressing has become the default.
This means that before you even get into what your daughter is wearing, you have to understand why she’s wearing it — which means engaging with the question with empathy and curiosity, not judgment and disapproval. As any daughter who has had screaming matches with her mother about clothing can attest, nothing makes you want to dig in and cling to your ratty old stuff more than an adult telling you that it’s ratty old stuff.
For instance, is your daughter thrifting because she feels passionately about sustainability and knows that the single easiest action anyone can take to mitigate fashion’s impact on the planet is to keep clothes in circulation longer (i.e., buy secondhand)?
Is her choice a financial decision, because she is at a stage of her life when she is literally trying on different identities and doesn’t want to invest in one until she’s sure it’s right?
Is her stance political, because she hates the elitism that fashion brands represent? Is it about fitting in with her peer group? Is it about comfort? Is it some combination of all of the above?
